100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.

  Suicides have already betrayed the body.

  * * *

  Still-born, they don’t always die,

  but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet

  that even children would look on and smile.

  * * *

  To thrust all that life under your tongue!—

  that, all by itself, becomes a passion.

  Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say,

  * * *

  and yet she waits for me, year after year,

  to so delicately undo an old wound,

  to empty my breath from its bad prison.

  * * *

  Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,

  raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,

  leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

  * * *

  leaving the page of the book carelessly open,

  something unsaid, the phone off the hook

  and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

  (February 3, 1964)

  In the poem Wilder has been transformed into a nameless interlocutor, possibly a therapist, the one who kicks off this lyric by inquiring about Sexton’s compulsion to kill herself, which the interlocutor cannot understand. According to Sexton’s biographer Diane Middlebrook, when Wilder asked this question, Sexton was not particularly thinking about destroying herself; rather, she was considering how to write about it—again. She had already published her first two books, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962) and had confessed to two attempts at suicide.

  At the time that she wrote “Wanting to Die” Sexton was especially interested in Arthur Miller’s new play, After the Fall, which centered on the self-destructiveness of a character obviously based on Miller’s celebrity ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe. Sexton’s former classmate and friendly competitor Sylvia Plath had committed suicide by asphyxiating herself about a year earlier, and you can feel Plath’s presence hovering somewhere in the background too. As evidence: Sexton included “Wanting to Die,” along with her poem “Sylvia’s Death,” an elegy she wrote just six days after Plath’s suicide, in a brief memoir that she composed about Plath called “The Bar Fly Ought to Sing” (1970). She states outright that the poem “was written directly for both of us and for that place where we met: ‘Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet.’” She also recalls how they used to reminisce in loving detail about their first suicide attempts. Like Plath’s, Sexton’s fascination with death was specific, lurid, and fervent. And yet she also referred to suicide, almost offhandedly, as “the opposite of the poem.” If that is true, then, as the critic Philip McGowan suggests, “suicide becomes anti-poetry.” It is an impulse against language.

  In the poem, however, Sexton rejects her own formulation when she declares that “suicides have a special language.” That language takes her to the edge of nullity, nothingness itself. Wilder’s initial probing question about suicide triggered what Sexton called a “morbid free association,” which she appended to a letter in mid-January 1964: “We live at such contrasts . . . you and me . . . me lapping the edges . . . me testing death . . . me raging at the corpse, the bread that I took for a kiss, the love, an infection.” In “Wanting to Die,” Sexton has organized these raw associations into eleven clearly organized tercets, a lucid thirty-three-line exposition.

  The speaker in Sexton’s poem is obsessed with dying perfectly. She confesses to her desire to die, yet the poem itself is vividly alive. In the first stanza, she describes her state of mind as cloudy and confused. She sees her desire for death in metaphorical terms as a voyage, a journey without return. The speaker feels an “unnamable lust” coming over her, something almost carnal she cannot control. And yet her argument is weirdly poised and logical. The speaker herself is not overcome by this uncontrollable feeling. Notice how at the beginning of the poem each line is a sentence, a station in the argument. The subject matter is boiling hot—one feels the percolating undertow, the raging lust for death—but the reasoning is cool-headed. Reread the opening with a focus on the language of argumentation:

  Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.

  I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.

  Then the almost unnamable lust returns.

  * * *

  Even then I have nothing against life.

  I know well the grass blades you mention,

  the furniture you have placed under the sun.

  * * *

  But suicides have a special language.

  Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

  They never ask why build.

  This language, which we associate with essayistic thinking, continues throughout; hence phrases such as “In this way” and “I did not think” and “and yet.” The somewhat detached argumentative side of the poem may be one of its spookier aspects. In an almost matter-of-fact way, Sexton’s speaker compares suicides to carpenters, tradesmen, people who make and repair things. She takes for granted that she is one of them.

  Middlebrook suggests that Sexton’s thoughts about suicide were pretty well entrenched by 1964, and so were her practices. She knew “which tools”—she planned to combine alcohol with an overdose of pills. She considered this “the woman’s way out,” as she told her psychiatrist Dr. Orne, who had encouraged her to write poetry after she had tried to commit suicide in 1956.

  The speaker in “Wanting to Die” is completely clear, unsentimental, and certain about her statements. She doesn’t hesitate. She knows exactly what she is talking about, even though she keeps describing her own behavior as irrational, as when she characterizes her battle with suicide as possessing the enemy, eating the enemy, which works its “magic” on her. This tension between rationality and irrationality is one of the defining features of this painfully sad poem.

  Sexton’s speaker keeps coming up with creative ways for characterizing suicide and her own will to die. She wants to control the moment of death itself, to take herself to the threshold. She is fascinated by the boundary. She sexualizes her own terminology throughout, using the words “lust,” “passion,” “kiss.” She speaks of suicides as stillborn and dazzled; she refers to death as something like candy, “a drug so sweet / that even children would look on and smile.” She equates death with “a sad bone.” She refers to an “old wound” in her body and portrays the body itself as a “bad prison.” The subject is death, but there is something curiously enthusiastic about the way the poem keeps generating metaphors for it. The two final stanzas hit a higher register, a feverish lyrical pitch. Like the moon, a typical image of high romance, the language is slightly pumped up:

  Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,

  raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,

  leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

  * * *

  leaving the page of the book carelessly open,

  something unsaid, the phone off the hook

  and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

  Despite its lyric height, the poem ends in a kind of speechlessness, the final silence of suicide, which permanently cuts things off. Hence the book left “carelessly open” and the phone left hanging off the hook. This is eerily reminiscent of the end of Alfonsina Storni’s suicide lyric, “I’m Going to Sleep.” The suicide inevitably leaves something unresolved, something never to be finished. In the end, even love seems only a final betrayal, something the speaker cannot comprehend (“whatever it was”), not a nourishment but a physical invasion of the body, “an infection.” Anne Sexton’s fascination with death followed her to the end.

  Rose Ausländer

  * * *

  “My Nightingale”

  (1965)

  Rose Ausländer was born in 1901 as Rosalie Scherzer in Czernowitz, a city in the northern region of Bukovina, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She came from a traditional German-speaking Jewish family and had a seemingly idyllic chi
ldhood in the city known as “Little Vienna” and “Jerusalem on the Prut.” The same world shaped both her and Paul Celan, whom she met during the war; they faced the same torturous history. At the end of World War I, Czernowitz was united with the Kingdom of Romania, but during World War II the Nazis took it over. Later it was returned to Romania, forming part of the Soviet Union. It is now a city in Ukraine.

  A promising student, Scherzer gave up her studies after her father died, in 1920. She immigrated to the United States when she was nineteen years old, married her fellow student Ignaz Ausländer when she was twenty-two, and separated from him three years later. But she was extremely close to her mother, who was an invalid, and kept returning to take care of her. Ausländer’s first book, The Rainbow (Der Regenbogen), was printed in Czernowitz in 1939. Two years later, German troops occupied the city. Along with her brother, Max, she and her mother were trapped in the ghetto, often hiding out in cellars, but they somehow survived. Later she testified that “while we waited for death, there were those of us who dwelt in dream-words—our traumatic home amidst our homelessness. To write was to live.”

  Ausländer was living in New York when her mother died in Romania in 1947. Overwhelmed by grief, she suffered a physical and psychological breakdown that lasted more than a year. She wrote many poems in response to the great loss of her life, including “The Mother” (“Die Mutter”), which declares, “I am her shadow and she my light.” My favorite is “My Nightingale” (“Meine Nachtigall”), which appeared in her second book, Blind Summer (Blinder Sommer), published in Vienna in 1965.

  My Nightingale

  My mother was a doe in another time.

  Her honey-brown eyes

  and her loveliness

  survive from that moment.

  * * *

  Here she was—

  half an angel and half humankind—

  the center wasmother.

  When I asked her once what she would have wanted to be

  she made this answer to me: a nightingale.

  * * *

  Now she is a nightingale.

  Every night, night after night, I hear her

  in the garden of my sleepless dream.

  She is singing the Zion of her ancestors.

  She is singing the hills and beech-woods

  of Bukowina.

  My nightingale

  sings lullabies to me

  night after night

  in the garden of my sleepless dream.

  (Translated by Eavan Boland)

  Like Dahlia Ravikovitch’s poem to her father, “On the road at night there stands the man,” there’s a fairy tale or mythological element to Ausländer’s acutely felt, highly personal poem for her mother. It’s like a lost story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. To emphasize the fairy tale dimension, one translation even begins: “Once upon a time my mother was a doe.” Ausländer suggests that the qualities of a doe, which seem to have come to her mother from some other world, could still be seen in her. There’s a sense of foreboding or ominousness hovering in the fourth line, in the feeling that her mother’s fragile allure from a previous life could somehow still “survive from that moment.”

  The sense of the mother being somewhat otherworldly is emphasized in the assertion “Here she was / half an angel and half humankind.” Ausländer felt a special kinship with the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler and translated her poem “Meine Mutter” into English (as “My Mother”); it begins with the question “Was she the great angel / who walked at my side?” The death of the mother was overwhelming for both poets, who felt the loss as total. After all, the center of the child’s world, the center of the universe itself, was mother. Ausländer italicizes the word for emphasis.

  As a poem, “My Nightingale” begins to turn when the speaker wistfully asks her mother what creature she would have liked to be, and she answers dreamily: a nightingale. Birds have often figured in poetry as messengers from the beyond. The nightingale—a small, secretive, solitary songbird that goes on singing late into the night—has had a special metaphorical and symbolic power for artists. It fills an apparently irresistible need to attribute human feelings to the bird’s pure and persistent song. Poets, who are often nocturnal creatures, have identified with “spring’s messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale,” as Sappho calls it. The history of these representations begins with one of the oldest legends in the world, the violent tale of Philomela, whose tongue was cut out and who was changed into a nightingale, which laments in darkness but nonetheless tells its story in song. As a European poet, Ausländer was certainly conscious of this long tradition, including the way the Romantic poets utilized the bird as a symbol of imaginative freedom. Remember John Keats’s dramatic exclamation: “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”

  “My Nightingale” subtly triggers and alters the tradition. The poem structurally turns in the third and final stanza: “Now she is a nightingale.” The mother may have been a doe in a past life, “another time,” but now she has been transfigured into something loftier, a bird, a figure of transcendence. The present tense is compelling because the reader understands immediately that the mother has been utterly transformed. She was always only partly of this world anyway. The poem now becomes a living testament, an elegy taking place in the present tense. Every night the mother’s song haunts the speaker’s “sleepless dream,” which is not an actual dream but a reverie under the magical spell of night, an associative or waking dream. As a nightingale, the mother sings of the world she loved as a woman: the Zion or Promised Land of her Jewish ancestors, the beautiful hills and trees of her native Bukovina. The maternal song is a nightly ritual, a lullaby, though a lullaby that keeps her daughter awake “in the garden of my sleepless dream.”

  Here the daughter becomes the listener and the mother the unseen songster, whose heartrending music testifies to what she loved. The message has been heard. And the poem itself captures the woebegone plaintiveness of the mother’s nightingale song.

  Randall Jarrell

  * * *

  “Next Day”

  (1965)

  Randall Jarrell threw himself fully into the role of a woman in a triad of poems strung across his work: “The Face,” “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” and “Next Day.” Each of these women stands both as herself and as a sort of Everywoman or, as Jarrell understood it, Every-person, a figure who is both ordinary and exceptional. This common fate is something that happens to everyone, Jarrell suggests: at first you mature and gain knowledge, but then, inevitably, something goes wrong. Jarrell’s androgynous poems unnervingly pursue the moment when something invisibly turns and goes awry, when the naked self radically breaks down its last defenses.

  “Next Day” is the lead poem in the last collection that Jarrell prepared for publication, The Lost World (1965), his finest book.

  Next Day

  Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,

  I take a box

  And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.

  The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical

  Food-gathering flocks

  Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

  * * *

  Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise

  If that is wisdom.

  Yet, somehow, as I buy All from these shelves

  And the boy takes it to my station wagon,

  What I’ve become

  Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

  * * *

  When I was young and miserable and pretty

  And poor, I’d wish

  What all girls wish: to have a husband,

  A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish

  Is womanish:

  That the boy putting groceries in my car

  * * *

  See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me.

  For so many years

  I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me

  And its mouth watered. How often th
ey have undressed me,

  The eyes of strangers!

  And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

  * * *

  Imaginings within my imagining,

  I too have taken

  The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog

  And we start home. Now I am good.

  The last mistaken,

  Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

  * * *

  Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm

  Some soap and water—

  It was so long ago, back in some Gay

  Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss

  My lovely daughter

  Away at school, my sons away at school,

  * * *

  My husband away at work—I wish for them.

  The dog, the maid,

  And I go through the sure unvarying days

  At home in them. As I look at my life,

  I am afraid

  Only that it will change, as I am changing:

  * * *

  I am afraid, this morning, of my face.

  It looks at me

  From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,